For a little while, every major Steam Sale came with a meta game attached. Over the years, they grew more elaborate, culminating in last year’s Steam Summer Sale Monster Game. But then Steam Sales changed. Now there’s no meta game to be found.

If you’ve got a piggy bank, kiss it goodbye. If you don’t, I guess stare deeply and lovingly into the imagined eyes of the Apple wallet icon on your phone or something. It’s summer, which means It Is Time: the Steam Summer Sale is here.

Raising your prices right before Steam’s big summer sale and then “discounting” them back to where they’d been for months sure sounds scummy, right? A handful of games have been accused of it, but the truth of the matter isn’t so black-and-white.

This year’s Steam Summer Sale comes with a twist: an entire game you can play to unlock new deals, trading cards, and the like. There’s just one problem: it’s not really doing the whole “working” thing at the moment.

The best conspiracy theory in gaming this week just might be that Valve fixed the game they built around their infamous Steam Summer Sale. Or the community figured out how to rig it themselves. Or something. Something crazy.

One of the most anticipated days of the summer is here: the Steam summer sale. PC gamers everywhere are examining their bank accounts and backlogs, wondering if they should drop some dollars on a enticing, cheap game.

If countless gamers are holding out for the Steam Summer Sale to stock up on games, then what we're really looking for from it are unprecedented prices. That wasn't the case last year, so let's take a look at 2014's offerings. As always, you are best served holding out for the flash sales that cycle every 8 hours.

It seems you can't discuss the Steam Summer Sale without doing one of the following: Personifying your wallet and mourning some injury done to it; bemoaning all the unplayed games you have before piling another on it; commanding friends to buy a game, more for the price than the game and, of course, buying games.

After all the fancy Photoshopped images and animated gifs tributing Valve's annual Summer Sale, the Internet finally got a catchy, well-produced song. It's made by Temp0, who's mostly known for his StarCraft II music videos, but after listening to this he really should continue to expand his repertoire.

Reddit user nathanbatson made this image to represent the utter damage done to his wallet after the start of the Steam summer sale. We had our own suggestions for you, but there are plenty of games people are gobbling up at heftily discounted prices for you to also melt your wallet with.